To erode or not to erode
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It kinda seems like the United States is facing an epistemic crisis. The average American doesn’t seem to have a good system for gathering and evaluating evidence.
Trust in the news media is down across the board, but especially among Republicans. Just over 60% of eligible Americans are fully Covid vaccinated. Only 67% of American adults agree with the statement “more facts get us closer to the truth.”
A broad swath of Americans increasingly making choices on who to vote for, whether to get vaccinated, etc. based on something other than empirical evidence seems like a not-great thing. At least, it doesn’t seem to work out well based on the evidence I’m familiar with.
I believe this epistemic crisis is inextricably linked to eroding trust in institutions.
Gallup: “Americans' average confidence in major U.S. institutions has edged down after increasing modestly several months into the coronavirus pandemic last year. Currently, an average 33% of U.S. adults express ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in 14 institutions, marking a three-percentage-point dip since 2020 and a return to the level seen in 2018 and 2019.”
Anthropologist Heidi Larson, founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, said recently: “We don’t have a misinformation problem. We have a trust problem.”
From the same article:
Trust in social media and traditional media is at an all-time low. Trust in the U.S. federal government to handle problems is at a near-record low. Trust in the U.S.’s major institutions is within 2 percentage points of the all-time low. The consequences are profound.
This matters for truth-seeking, because no one has time to read the bulk of the academic literature on the vast majority of decisions they need to make. We need institutions to gather, analyze, and summarize the empirical evidence for us. When we don’t trust those institutions, we’re left to rely on grifters, superstition, moral intuition, tribalism, politicians, etc. to help guide our decisions.
“Institutions” is just a fancy word for organizations and collections of organizations who have power in society. They can be private or public. Institutions can include churches, unions, public schools, the medical industrial complex, etc.
OECD found five factors what highly impact whether someone trusts government institutions:
Things that boost trust in institutions:
More trustworthy institutions (duh)
People seeing taxes and social transfers as effective and equitable
High-quality public services
Economic security (Across countries, economically secure people, (high-income, highly-educated), report higher institutional trust than the rest of the population—68% vs 52%.)
Institutional transparency
Political participation, whether people feel they have a say in politics
Approval of government action on long-term and global challenges
One question I have: To what extent does trust in institutions itself, separate from whether the institutions are actually trustworthy, impact quality of life for the average person in a society? That is, in a scenario in which you have no hope of directly or indirectly impacting the actual trustworthiness of institutions in your society, does it increase or decrease quality of life for the average person for you to raise or lower average trust in institutions?
My intuition is that decreased trust in institutions *by itself* decreases quality of life for the average person.
We do have evidence that low institutional trust is itself a problem. Beyond contributing to an epistemic crisis, it creates a vicious cycle of disengagement and unwillingness to pay taxes, which further erodes the quality of public services, which further erodes institutional trust.
The question is, I think, whether eroding public trust in institutions is likely enough to lead to positive institutional change that it’s worth the cost. That is, does talking shit about institutions actually increase the likelihood they’ll clean up their acts enough to offset any negative impacts of the shit-talking itself?
I honestly don’t know. But I think it’s an important question, especially for anyone with any influence.
Here’s some further reading on the topic suggested by Twitter:
Revolt of the Public